THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY. 777 



clear light immediately around him ; and, on the other hand, that 

 power of foreseeing future consequences of immediate action 

 which forms the greater part of what we call sagacity. The for- 

 mer gave him his notable dialectic skill, and mark all his contri- 

 butions to scientific literature ; the latter made him, in addition, 

 an able administrator and a wise counselor, both within the tents 

 of science and beyond. These, at least, were his dominant intel- 

 lectual qualities ; but even more powerful were the qualities in 

 him which, though allied, we distinguish as moral ; and perhaps 

 the greater part of his influence over his fellows was due to the 

 fact that every one who met him saw in him a man bent on fol- 

 lowing the true and doing the right, swerving aside no tittle, either 

 for the sake of reward or for fear of the enemy, a man whose 

 uttered scorn of what was mean and cowardly was but the recip- 

 rocal of his inward love of nobleness and courage. 



Bearing in mind his possession of these general qualities, we 

 may find the key to the influence exerted by him on biological 

 science in what he says of himself in his all too short autobio- 

 graphic sketch namely, that the bent of his mind was toward 

 mechanical problems, and that it was the force of circumstances 

 which, frustrating his boyish wish to be a mechanical engineer, 

 brought him to the medical profession. Probably the boyish 

 wish was merely the natural outcome of an early feeling that the 

 solution of mechanical problems was congenial to the clear, deci- 

 sive way of thinking, to which I referred above, and which was 

 obviously present even in the boy ; and that it was not the sub- 

 ject-matter of mechanical problems, but the mode of treating 

 them which interested him, is shown by the incident recorded by 

 himself, how when he was a mere boy a too zealous attention to a 

 post-mortem examination cost him a long illness. It is clear that 

 the call to solve biologic problems came to him early ; it is also 

 clear that the call was a real one; and, as he himself has said, he 

 recognized his calling when, after some years of desultory reading 

 and lonely, irregular mental activity, he came under the influence 

 of Wharton Jones at Charing Cross Hospital. That made him a 

 biologist, but confirmed the natural aptitude of his mind in mak- 

 ing him a biologist who, rejecting all shadowy, intangible views, 

 was to direct his energies to problems which seemed capable of 

 clear demonstrable proof. In many respects the biologic prob- 

 lems which lend themselves most readily to demonstrable solu- 

 tions capable of verification are those which constitute what we 

 call physiology ; and if at the time of his youth the way had been 

 open to him, Huxley would probably have become known as a 

 physiologist. But at that time careers for physiologists were of 

 the fewest. His master, Wharton Jones, a physiologist of the 

 first rank, whose work in the first half of this century still re- 



YOL. XLVII. 63 



